(NEW YORK) — The Kremlin has claimed it does not know where the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny is currently held and it has no intention of looking into his status.
The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov also rebuffed expressions of concern from the U.S. over Navalny’s disappearance, calling it “unacceptable.”
“Here we are talking about one prisoner who, according to the law, was found guilty and is serving his sentence, and here we consider any intervention by anyone, including the United States of America, unacceptable and impossible,” he told reporters during his daily off-camera briefing.
A lawyer-turned-politician, Navalny has been in jail since 2021, when he returned to Russia after recovering in Germany from nerve agent poisoning that he blamed on the Kremlin. In 2022, a Russian judge added another nine years to Navalny’s sentence of 2 1/2 years for embezzlement and other charges.
Navalny was being held in Correctional Facility No. 6 in the Vladimir region, about 100 miles east of Moscow.
Navalny’s team on Monday said he had disappeared from the prison camp where he is held and accused authorities of refusing to say where he had been moved.
Peskov on Tuesday claimed the Kremlin is unable to track individual prisoners.
“We have neither the intention nor the ability to track the fate of prisoners and the process of their stay in the relevant institutions,” he said.
Navalny’s spokeswoman said he did not appear as scheduled via video link for a court hearing on Tuesday.
Kyra Yarmysh, the spokeswoman, wrote on X that they still have no idea where Navalny is. He missed another court hearing last week that she said officials had claimed was because of an “electrical emergency.”
“Today Alexey again wasn’t brought to court by video, but now no one said stupid things about ‘an electrical failure.’ The officer from Correctional Facility 6 said Alexey ‘departed from our camp,’ but where he was taken allegedly nobody knows,” she wrote. “They lied about the ‘failure’ for 6 days just to stall for time.”
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